Shooting down the lockdown blues – #LockdownDairies

The EisenVault team has been at its productive best during the lockdown, despite being holed up at home, due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Surprisingly the sales and business development team too have kept busy, with inbound leads, chasing contracts and restarting some stalled discussions. The customer success team has as always been helping our customers be productive and efficient even when you continue to work from home. The engineering team has been accelerating development of future products like EisenVault 2.0 and EisenLens (stay tuned to know more). The finance, operations and management teams have been available for any customer request or team queries.

The team has settled into a rhythm of working office hours and beyond. Joining the check-in calls on Zoom with videos twice a day. An elaborate call every morning with detailed discussion on tasks on hand and requesting for any assistance that may be needed from a team member and an afternoon one to just confirm if all’s going well. To keep work going and keep resolving issues and managing projects separate team calls are also scheduled. All the constant communication and coordination has made working from home easy, just that sometimes internet speed and connectivity play spoilsport.

In this period of staying home and social distancing, despite the fact work is getting done, social interaction like tea breaks, lunch time chats and watercooler gossip are amiss. In words of Aristotle, “Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.” Given all of us are neither beasts nor god to the best of my knowledge the lack of socialising is stark in these times of lockdown.

We have tried different things to keep all engaged and provide an office like feel as much as possible with creating cross functional projects in smaller groups. Every Friday the check-in has a fun activity integrated. We did a contest of funniest head gear, and a photo sharing session, where team members shared pictures of themselves and family or anything they felt would kindle interest.

The activity this Friday by far had the most involvement and brought out the creative side of many team members. The contest was “Shoot down the lockdown blues”. Each team member was asked to click pictures from the confines of their home and share it with the team, the result was astounding. Some lazy bums including myself just shared mundane clicks. However, the vast majority did put in a lot of effort to submit the best clicks and clicking 50-60 photos and choosing the best one to submit. The result was an amazing gallery of pictures for all to see. Efforts to get the perfect click was commendable. A team member got up early to capture the rising sun, a couple of them dressed up to be able to share a smart selfie, one created origami birds and perched them on an indoor plant created a matching backdrop, one patiently waited for the little bird to settle into the nest and pose, one created a moon behind the miniature Taj Mahal, a few clicked flowers in full blossom or dried up, few clicked birds, insects or animals around, some used filters to have funny pictures of themselves or create rainbows, one took a picture of a small flower and used a toothpick to give a sense of scale and size.

The call was fun, all were engrossed, the pictures were shared, and the background explained by each team member. Some like me got the boos, but the most got admiration for the effort and the output. The pictures were put to vote and there was a very close contest and results are for all to see. The talent and creative side of some of our unassuming colleagues came as a surprise. Looking forward to knowing more about my team members over the next couple of weeks.